“Sharon?” he said.
He’d gained weight in the past couple of years. His hair must have been at least a quarter of an inch long. I realized he was out of the military.
“How have you been?” he asked me. He was so warm and friendly, as though we barely knew each other. “Whatchyou been up to?” “I’m just here watching my friend,” I said.
“It’s a great show, isn’t it?” Then he said, “Mom, Dad, this is Sharon.”
Wayne introduced me to his mother, Rosemary, who was about five feet tall and wearing a blue-and-white muumuu with a white cardigan sweater, and to his dad, George, who took my hand in his iron grip. He was about six foot six in an aloha shirt and jeans, and exquisite hand-tooled leather boots. They’d come out from Colorado to visit Wayne, who was now through with his tour of duty, during which he’d lived in Germany for a year and a half, and had come back to settle down, as he put it, and gone into the construction business and had his own place in Aina Haina, which he had fixed up himself.
It was so weird. It was like an out-of-body experience. Me saying to Rosemary and George, “Is this the first time you’ve been in the islands?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, it is,” said Rosemary. Me saying, “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
“Just about the prettiest place I’ve ever seen,” said George. “Sharon, where are you from?”
“I’m from Boston,” I said.
“And have you lived here long?”
“Just about fourteen years,” I said. All of a sudden my voice was sounding like theirs. It was just like talking to somebody from England and starting to talk British. It was awful, but I couldn’t stop. “Sure beats Boston,” I told them. “How long are you staying?”
“Just a week,” said Rosemary.
“My folks came out for a week too,” I said. “They came out for their golden anniversary last year. Mom said it was the best anniversary present she ever had.”
“You bet,” said George.
“Now, did they come on a package?” Rosemary asked.
IT was the boots I kept thinking about during the second half. George’s gorgeous cordovan leather boots with their long, pointy toes. So that was where Wayne was from, I kept thinking. The Mainland, where there was such a thing as dress boots.
I told Tom we had to hit the road as soon as the show was over. I told him I was going to have to make a break for it. But somehow, while Tom was off congratulating Will, and I was running away, there they were, Wayne and his folks, smiling at me, and there I was, coming up to them and getting all folksy myself. It was one of those compulsions I had—liking strangers, and somehow wanting to please them. I’d thought I was over that kind of thing, but I guess not.
We just stood out in the lobby of the theater and visited together. We just stood there and had such a pleasant time we all spontaneously decided to go back to the Tahitian Lanai and have a nightcap.
So we drove to Waikiki, and we went into the bar, and sat around at a table, a respectful distance from the paintings on black velvet, and we talked about life at high altitudes. And Rosemary and I had little drinks and Wayne and George had big ones, until Rosemary said it was really past her bedtime, and I said it was past mine too. And George and Rosemary kissed Wayne good-night and went to their room, and Wayne was going to take me home. And it was amazing. We just strolled down Ena Road to get the car, and Wayne didn’t invade my space, or rehash our breakup, or talk about our past at all. He was so relaxed and calm I couldn’t get over it.
A full moon was shining over the hotels. People were streaming out of the late movies, and we walked out to the marina on the sidewalk ribbon between the traffic and the beach. Streetlights on one side and on the other the gentle night, the white waves coming in small and soft onto the sand. “Wayne,” I said, “you’re different.”
“I’ve been working a lot on myself,” he told me.
Then it was my turn to look at him funny. He’d never talked that way before. “You’re a lot different from the Wayne I used to know,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, looking at me with his clear blue eyes. “I appreciate that.”
“Can I just ask you something?”
“What?”
“Are you into est?”
“What’s est?” he said.
“Never mind.”
“Sharon,” he said, “I have one real regret.”
“Just one?” I teased him.
“Let me rephrase that,” he said. “I have one major regret.”
“Which is?”
“I didn’t treat you with respect.”
I thought about that a minute. Then I said, “Actually, I didn’t treat you with that much respect either.”
“I didn’t listen to you.”
“I know.”
“And you were saying important things,” Wayne said. “I didn’t get that. When you were talking about seeing God and all. I never considered maybe you were really after something.”
“Yeah, maybe. I thought I was. I didn’t get very far, though.”
“No?” He sounded surprised.
“Not really. I think I went about it wrong. I mean up on my high horse. Why’re you looking so surprised?”
“Sharon,” Wayne said, “if anybody could go far, you could.”
Now we’d reached Wayne’s beat-up Jeep. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I told him.
He came around and opened my door for me. “Can you forgive me?” he asked.
I told him the truth. “I forgave you a long time ago.”
16
Candlelight
HOW can I put it? I went back to Wayne. And actually we did fairly well together. We went camping. We drove around in Wayne’s new black truck. We made dinner at the co-op. All of that. We hardly fought, except a few times. I was very rarely scared of him, because I warned him straight off that if he started looking at me funny, I was out of there. To be perfectly honest he didn’t lift a hand against me all that time. Just about the only thing he did was break one of the co-op chairs, which did frighten me. But it was just that once. And I’d never even liked that chair.
So one fine Saturday all full of cheer I ran up the stairs to Brian’s office, since I was so tired of waiting to bump into him to tell him my news. I knew he would be there. He was trying to catch up on his work on the weekends, given that his magnum opus on the Pacific birds was still unfinished, due to writer’s block, and also due to the fact Imo was in New Zealand for the semester. She had tenure now in Auckland, but she hadn’t been able to parlay that into any kind of real job at the University of Hawaii. So Brian and Imo were still dealing with a commuter relationship, which made him pretty miserable.
But I came bounding in, and I shoved over some papers and plopped myself on his desk and said, “Hey, Brian, what’s up, man?”
“Sharon,” Brian said, “What’s up with you?”
“Nothing! Life is good!” I jumped up and pulled on the cord of his miniblinds and they swooped up in a cloud of dust. “Don’t they ever wash the windows?”
“You’ve converted to something, haven’t you?” he said.
“I have not. You are so cynical. I am at a totally stable place right now. I am in a state of rest. Wayne and I are talking about moving in together.”
“You’re kidding me. Wayne!”
“I kid you not.” I was so peppy.
“Wayne is back in the picture.”
“He’s back in my life. No, really, the thing is, he’s a different human being. He’s been through a lot. He’s thought a lot.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s the gentlest guy now. He owns his own business. He has his own house; he’s helping out his brother, who he’s really close to. Brian, you don’t even know, he is so good to me. Before it was like we were reading different books. Now it’s like we’re reading the same page.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Brian said. “This is the guy who would not for one second leave you alo
ne. This is the guy that had his hands on you at all times.”
“He was threatened by me,” I said.
“Oh, he was threatened by you!”
“Back then he didn’t get it that I was an individual. He didn’t understand about me having my own spirit. Now, you should see, he just wants to learn from me and explore with me. Now he’s the one encouraging me to …”
“To what?”
“To seek.”
Brian scooted back in his swivel chair and took me in. “Wayne. You’re moving in with Wayne.”
“People change, you know,” I told him. “He is a person who has profoundly changed. You just remember how he was. You just remember how he always tore me down, but now, he just gifts me.”
“He gifts you. Is that even a verb?”
“Yes it’s a verb!”
It was true, Wayne gifted me. And not just with material things. He actually wrote me cards. He wrote me messages about our relationship. He wrote about how he felt that we were closer now than we had ever been back when we’d gone out before. And we were closer. We were both older. We’d both been through stuff. Good and bad. Wayne had actually been married and divorced by a woman on the Mainland he’d thought he loved, but she was only interested in money and clothes and fancy things they couldn’t afford. She had been a clinical shopaholic, maxing out her credit cards every single day. It was a sickness for her. It was like compulsive gambling. She’d gotten them so debt ridden George and Rosemary had to step in and help Wayne out. Then, during the divorce, this woman had demanded more than half of everything Wayne owned! After which, Wayne had started rethinking some of his prejudices toward my desire to lead a more spiritual life, and his disrespect of the idea of visions coming to people. “Your vision that you had was of God, and her vision was strictly name brand every time,” he told me. “I didn’t know when you went through your vision how lucky I was!” Being so distraught Wayne entered therapy, which was probably the best thing he’d ever done. He began to think about what actually did matter in life, and what one’s priorities might possibly be.
Our new relationship was on such a completely different plane from what we’d had. For example, before Wayne had never listened to me when I said how I’d love someday to get a tattoo, because he’d insisted that tattoos were out of place on women, and they were just a guy thing. But now, when I spoke of it, he heard me. He was attuned to my thoughts about how it would be so beautiful to have an artwork engraved on your own body, and he took me down to Waikiki, to his own guy, who generally only did enlisted men, and he held my hand while I had it done: a tattoo the size of a silver dollar right under my belly button. A tattoo of the earth. He stood by me the whole time while the earth was inked into my skin. Tears slid from my eyes, and not just because of the pain. He gifted me.
“See.” I rolled down the waistband of my shorts to show Brian.
“Sharon!”
He was so embarrassed and appalled and all, I had to laugh.
“What did you do to yourself?”
“Why do you have to be so negative all the time? You’re supposed to be happy for me.”
“I’m not happy for you,” he said.
“Brian, what is wrong with you?”
He didn’t answer. He looked at me with stranger’s eyes.
“Look, it’s not like I came here to ask your blessing to move in with the guy,” I said. “It’s not like I came here for you to lecture me on how you never liked the guy. It’s not like I said to myself, Well, I’d better make sure I know what Brian thinks of all this.”
“I think you’re a fool,” he said.
“Thanks a lot!”
“I think you talk so much about your seeking and your spiritual growth you don’t actually ever manage to do any. I think you’re so focused on yourself you’re blind to what’s actually happening to you.”
Slowly, I backed away. It was as if he’d reached out and slapped my face. My eyes stung. I said, “What’d I do to you, Brian? What’d I ever do to you to make you talk that way?” I said again, “I thought you were my friend.”
“I am your friend,” he said.
But I didn’t see what he meant. I walked out of there so defensive and so hurt I didn’t see anything anymore. I just wandered through the campus about to cry. If I’d bumped into anyone I knew I’m sure I would have, I was so full of tears. Brian, of all people, had turned against me! I’d just thought we could hang out for a while and then have lunch together and we could talk about me moving into Wayne’s place. I’d actually come in thinking Brian might help me move some of my stuff!
So now I had a whole Saturday ahead of me, and Wayne was at work. I went out to University Avenue and I got on a bus, and I thought—I’ll go and see Leilani. But halfway out to Sea Life Park I changed my mind. What was I going for? Another lecture, only this time in dolphin language? Instead, I got off at Wailupe and trundled over to Dovidl and Ruchel’s new and bigger CHAI house, where they’d moved since they needed more space, and where I hadn’t even set foot in months.
Everyone was eating lunch at two long tables, and the place smelled like beef stew, and there was Fred chowing down, and the Sugarmans, and various other people, and a couple of kids. Dovidl jumped up as soon as I came through the door. “Sharon!” Dovidl cried as if I were his own long-lost sister.
“Sharon, come, sit!” Ruchel said, and I saw she wasn’t pregnant anymore. She’d had her baby. She was busy making a place for me while she held her baby girl.
Everybody was so happy to see me. They said blessings and gave me wine and challah bread and stew, which was called cholent. We sat, and ate, and ate, and sang songs in Hebrew from little books, where the texts were transliterated and translated so you could follow along.
“We missed you,” Dovidl said.
Sheepishly, I smiled. As I said, I hadn’t been around the CHAI house much. I wasn’t crazy about the CHAI services with the segregation they had going between men and women, not to mention them being so long and all in Hebrew. Yet it was comforting, after Brian, to be welcomed like that. It was such a relief after my so-called friend who just criticized and picked away at me every chance he got. He never took me in with open arms.
The food was so good, I actually started to get drowsy eating lunch. Everybody did. Dr. Sugarman started telling all of us how the services and the food reminded him of his childhood, and Betsy started pursing her lips like she always did when he went on like that, since apparently the doctor had grown up Reform in Ohio, not the Old Country. Betsy thought the doctor had some kind of nostalgia delusion going on. But I said to her, “No, Betsy, see, I understand what he means. Cholent makes me nostalgic too.”
And she said, “How can you be nostalgic for something that never was?”
She didn’t understand that’s the strongest nostalgia there is, when you’re missing and reminiscing about what you never had. I would have pointed to Fred, except I didn’t want to put him on the spot. He was the perfect example. He practically got tears in his eyes from Ruchel’s kugel, and he’d grown up Irish Catholic.
I was feeling a lot better by the end of lunch, but then as everybody started to leave, Dovidl twisted my arm to stay for his beginning Judaism class—which at that point had a somewhat low enrollment, of one: just Fred.
A little voice inside me said, You really should stay, since you just ate all this food. But I looked at Dovidl and I sighed and said, “I wish I could.”
“Aw, come on, Sharon,” said Fred. “I can give you a ride home.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Dovidl, I’ll be honest with you, Judaism classes aren’t really my thing.”
“Why not?” He smiled at me encouragingly.
“It’s the details. I took a whole intensive course in Jerusalem.”
“Oh, you’ve been to Yerushalayim,” Dovidl said, impressed.
How to put it. “I just don’t relate well to some of the details of the religion.”
Dovidl looked at me sagely,
or as sagely as he could, given he was now twenty-one. It was great, here he was a bearded rabbi, while in another life he could have been a college sophomore. He said to me, “I have a sense you’re looking for something.”
Fred smiled and looked down at his hands. He must have heard the line before.
But I nodded.
Dovidl said, “What is it?”
For a long moment I couldn’t speak. After all my classes, and my wild goose chases, part of me didn’t even want to have this conversation. Yet inside of me still there was such curiosity. There was such desire to ask about God. All my repressed curiosity was pulling against the caution I’d learned. And there was Fred, and Dovidl standing next to him waiting. They were waiting and waiting. I was getting squirmy in front of them.
Squirmy. Squirmier. And then my caution snapped. “Well, I’m looking for spirituality,” I said. “I’m looking for magic, and miracles. I’m looking for God—not being some abstract concept but appearing in the world. I’m looking for the Creator—not just slam bam, thank you, ma’am—but in a feminine way, too, all the time interacting with the heavens and earth and the light and dark and all the animals and people and the plants. I’m looking for God to reappear in my life. That’s what I’ve been seeking in religions for a lot of years—but I’ve never got there—all the way. It’s like I get to a certain plateau and then I get stuck, and I can never get to the next level, so actually, even though I want them to, religions just tend not to take on me.”
Dovidl didn’t even blink an eye. He just nodded, like what I was saying made all the sense in the world. He said, “That was because of your Yiddishe neshama—your Jewish soul! You have a Yiddishe neshama inside of you, so naturally, no matter how hard you tried, no other religions in the world were going to stick to you. That’s the way it is with us. Once you’re born a Jew, a Jew you will be, no matter what things you do or religions you try. Your parents are Jewish, therefore so are you. As simple as that.”